Dan Proft revisited the ongoing debate over transgender participation in women’s and girls’ sports and access to single-sex spaces, an issue he said received passing attention at this week’s GOP midterm convention in Dallas. Proft replayed testimony from a recent Oshkosh, Wisconsin school board meeting in which a speaker who identified as a transgender woman urged board members to stop treating questions about locker room and sports policy as a matter of religious belief, arguing that protections extended to transgender students in the workplace should extend to students as well, and that opposition to those policies amounts to imposing one group’s beliefs on another. Proft disagreed with that framing, arguing the dispute is not about personal belief but about policy that affects other people when there is disagreement over how shared spaces and competitions should be structured.
Proft then spoke with Kara Dansky, a civil rights attorney, self-described feminist activist and author of “The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls,” who also has a forthcoming book on the same subject. Dansky, who describes herself as a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, or TERF, pushed back on the Oshkosh school board speaker’s framing, arguing that the distinction between male and female is not a belief subject to compromise but a biological fact, and that she sees no room for a middle position on the question of who qualifies as a woman for purposes of sex-based spaces and competition, unlike issues such as abortion where she said she could imagine common ground with Proft’s audience despite disagreeing on the underlying policy.
The two discussed comments made in past years by transgender cyclist and golfer Veronica Ivy, who has argued that people must simply decide whether they believe transgender women are the same as women, and by ACLU attorney Chase Strangio, who has made similar arguments regarding transgender athletes. Dansky said she agrees with Ivy’s framing of the question as binary, even as she reaches the opposite conclusion. Proft also referenced Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s past comments describing violence against transgender women in the city as an epidemic, which he characterized skeptically.
Dansky said she has faced years of ostracization from parts of the political left for her views, including strained relationships with friends and family, but said that opposition has softened somewhat in recent years and that polling shows a majority of rank-and-file Democrats share her position on issues like sports eligibility, even as she said the party’s institutional leadership, including groups like the ACLU, the Human Rights Campaign, Planned Parenthood and the National Organization for Women, has not. She distinguished that institutional leadership from ordinary Democratic voters, whom she said are largely not celebrating the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, whose death she noted had its one-year anniversary around the time of the interview, and said she personally discussed these issues publicly with Kirk in 2022. She also noted that Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker’s cousin, Jennifer Pritzker, is a transgender woman described by some sources as the first openly transgender billionaire, and said she would be concerned if J.B. Pritzker were to seek the presidency.
Asked about current college and semi-professional athletes challenging the WNBA’s eligibility rules by publicly declaring intent to try out for the league, Dansky said she generally supports the effort as a way of forcing the league to either allow them to compete or state clearly that it does not consider men to be women, though she said some of the recent public messaging from those athletes has struck her as bullying toward women and made her uneasy. She also praised WNBA player Sophie Cunningham’s public comments on the topic, saying she has attended multiple Indiana Fever games specifically to support Cunningham and plans to attend another game in Indianapolis in the coming weeks. Dansky argued that mainstream feminist organizations have, in her view, abandoned a coherent definition of womanhood, and said she publishes her ongoing writing on the topic through her Substack newsletter, The Turf Report.